I noticed that there appears to be a general assumption amongst my readers that unified consensus systems must have higher latency than partitioned consensus systems. In this post, I want to clear up some of the misconceptions and inaccurate assumptions around these latency tradeoffs, and present a deeper (and technical) analysis on how these different approaches to consensus have surprisingly broad consequences on transaction latency. We will analyze the latency tradeoff from three perspectives: (1) Latency for write transactions, (2) Latency for linearizable read-only transactions and (3) Latency for serializable snapshot transactions.